


Days Under Different Suns

by GingersSailboat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (No reylo), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Armitage Hux Lives, Ben Solo Lives, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pilot Ben Solo, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Redeemed Armitage Hux, Redeemed Ben Solo, Resistance Member Ben Solo, Sex, happy ending guaranteed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:01:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21892561
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingersSailboat/pseuds/GingersSailboat
Summary: Armitage Hux wakes up on a shuttle he doesn't recognise, drifting through dead space with two open wounds and an air supply that's running out fast. He has no idea who put him there, and remembers nothing beyond being shot by General Pryde.Ben Solo is slowly integrating with the Resistance, who are now intent on restoring peace to the galaxy and ending the cycle of hatred and wars that has plagued them for so long. Although every effort is being made to accept him and put him to use, there is a part of him that can't stop thinking about Hux, who he believes to be dead and continues to mourn despite the conflict it brings to his new relationships among the Resistance.(A.K.A - a much-needed fix-it fic wherein Hux survives his execution, with the help of some loyal First Order officers, and sets about attempting to find Ben so they can continue the relationship that had been developing between them before the events of RoS. Please read notes for more information!)
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 104
Kudos: 417





	1. Brace For Impact

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! So, this is my take on a fix-it fic in the wake of Rise of Skywalker. I know a lot of people are upset with Hux's death, myself included, so I'm writing this as a way to hopefully make it a little better! I'm going to try and stick as close to canon with this as possible, meaning that I will not be ignoring the twists and turns in Hux and Ren's relationship over the course of the first two movies, because I think part of what makes this whole situation so interesting to write is the complex feelings between the two of them and how they're going to deal with that when they both ultimately love each other despite everything that's happened.
> 
> I'm also not going to ignore the fact that the reylo kiss happened - I can promise you that this story won't contain any sort of reylo romance, and that Ben will ultimately - and quickly - decide that he's only interested in Hux, however there will be a scene or two of him thinking over everything that's happened from a logical, contemplative point of view, including the kiss with Rey. Again, I think the best kind of fix-it fic is one that you could see making feasible sense in the context of the canon, so I'm trying to keep this as accurate as possible while giving us the happy ending we want. 
> 
> With that said, I really hope you enjoy the fic! It will be multi-chapter and I'll try and move it along quickly since I know everyone wants to soothe the hurt of RoS by getting to their reunion already. If you do enjoy this first chapter, please please please leave a kudos and a comment as it motivates me to write much more and much faster, thanks! <3

**“Air supply critical. Seek atmosphere immediately. Air supply critical. Seek atmosphere immediately.”**

Something was hitting his arm. Incessantly, over and over.

_Thud, thud, thud._

Hux’s eyes blinked open slowly, blurred and resistant to the pulsating red light that immediately became visible as they narrowed into slits. The first thing he became aware of was the pain, searing white-hot pain tearing through his abdomen and down his left leg. A tenuous shift of that leg confirmed that moving it only made it worse, and so for a second he simply lay there on his back, allowing his eyes to adjust to the strange, alternating pattern of darkness and dim red that enveloped him. He felt short of breath as though he’d been running, and when he tried breathing in too deeply it simply tugged at the wound through his stomach and the pain flared up with more intensity than before.

Wincing, Hux let his head roll to one side, eyes seeking out something to orient himself. They fell upon a small round viewport only a couple of feet away from him, higher up on the wall, which confirmed to him that he was indeed lying on the floor of wherever the hell he was. Through the viewport, stars drifted past slowly in a way that suggested he wasn’t travelling at lightspeed, and in the very corner of the window he could just make out the curved edge of some sort of planet, a deep burnt orange surrounded by a glow.

It was really quite peaceful, the slow crawl of space. So peaceful that he almost didn’t register the alarm blaring through the ancient, tinny speakers on the control panel in front of him, or the repeated thudding of something large and solid against his shoulder that had clearly been the thing to wake him in the first place.

It was only a few seconds later that Hux fully realised what was going on, and actually listened to the voice alerting him to the fact that his air supply was running out. Sitting up much too fast and immediately regretting it when the wound on his stomach stretched and wept out more blood, Hux hissed in pain and began to struggle to his feet.

“ _Shit_ …shit, shit, shit…” He dragged himself over to the console and sat himself down heavily, looking over the panel in front of him frantically. His first priority was to shut off the alarm and give himself some silence to think, which he accomplished after flicking a couple of buttons that were lit up amongst the others on the panel that were dark. Once the alarm stopped, and the voice with it, the light stopped pulsing and settled on a steady red glow that was much easier on his eyes and much less distressing in general.

The quiet was an immense relief, and it gave him time to take stock of exactly where he was. It was some kind of shuttle, that much was obvious immediately; he couldn’t see any controls for weapons or shields, which meant that whatever he was travelling in had never been intended for battle or even extended flight. The fact the air supply was running low also confirmed that, as any bigger ship would have the resources and systems in place to ensure that a lack of air was never a possibility. The entire thing was only a few square feet, only just big enough for him to have been laying out flat on the floor without needing to bend any limbs. And, Hux observed, it was positively ancient.

The panel was using technology he hadn’t seen since the Empire ships he’d flown in as a child, old and antiquated remnants of an era he barely even remembered. Two of the three screens in front of him were dead, and the third had a long crack running diagonally across it, the lettering behind it blurry and in a language he didn’t recognise. So, that was useless, then. It meant he had no way of getting coordinates, no way of figuring out where he was or where to go next. And in a ship that was rapidly losing air, he wasn’t blind to how much of a problem that presented.

Hux leaned back in his chair and reached up to touch his stomach tentatively, feeling around until his fingers came into contact with what he’d been hoping to find – bandages. So, whatever had happened, someone had wrapped him up after Pryde had shot him on the bridge. Someone had taken the time to bandage him, despite the fact that the bandages felt rough and poor quality and were too loose for a professional droid to have done them. They were hastily and inexpertly applied, and currently soaked through with blood. But it was evidence that someone had remained loyal to him. Someone had been invested in making sure he didn’t die. But who?

In all honesty, Hux was unbelievably surprised he was still alive. He hadn’t expected Pryde to believe him when he told him the rebels had overpowered him, and even as he’d walked on to the bridge with his cane and his bandaged leg he’d been preparing for the worst. It had been quicker than he’d anticipated; Pryde’s attitude towards him had led him to believe he’d carry out some sort of torture just for the grim satisfaction of it, but no, he’d just shot him where he stood before Hux could even say a word. He remembered being blown backwards by the force of it, the immediate burn of the blaster fire hitting his flesh, and then a dull ‘crack’ as he’d landed and his head had connected hard with the durasteel floor. After that everything went black, and he would have said that was the time he was meant to have died. The fact he survived was no accident, it was clearly by design, only he had no idea who in the Order would risk their own life and limb to get him smuggled on to some Imperial relic of a transport and out into dead space undetected.

A series of tuneful beeps from behind his chair pulled him from his thoughts. Spinning around, Hux looked down his nose at the source of the noise, only to find the familiar, spherical shape of a First Order droid staring right back up at him. There had been an abundance of them on the Finalizer, programmed to carry out menial tasks and transmit messages, and Hux couldn’t for the life of him imagine why there was one now trapped with him on his apparent escape shuttle.

“You woke me up,” he told it, his tone accusatory as though the droid hadn’t saved his life by alerting him to the alarms going off all around him. It seemed unphased in any case, beeping once more and swivelling in a single rotation before falling still again. Hux narrowed his eyes. “What are you?”

The droid rolled itself round so its serial number was visible next to its head, and Hux squinted to get a look at it in the dim light.

“BB-13. Alright.” He dragged a hand over his face, feeling lightheaded from the effort of sitting up and coping with the pain still coursing through him. “Why are you here?” He was loathed to admit that he didn’t understand something – admitting that had never come naturally to him, as someone raised to always be the best and smartest man in the room – but he knew he needed to be open to anything if he was to find a way out of his current situation. As it stood, he was running out of air, he was lost somewhere in a corner of the galaxy he wasn’t familiar with, the First Order was completely gone, and he was critically wounded. One way or another, he needed to find help.

Beeping once more, BB-13 opened a small panel in the front of his body, out of which slid a tiny metal tray containing a folded piece of paper. Old-fashioned paper, the kind Hux only ever saw at markets on the very poorest of planets whenever they used to conduct routine raids and inspections. Everyone on the Finalizer, and every other dreadnought to the best of his knowledge, used data pads to communicate and had no need whatsoever of traditional writing methods. Someone had wanted their actions to be untraceable, and paper was good for that.

Frowning, Hux leaned forward with a pained groan and slid the note off the tray. His blood-stained fingers marked up the smooth white paper immediately, but he didn’t give it any thought as he unfolded it and spread it out on the console where the lighting was ever so slightly better.

> _General Hux,_
> 
> _I apologise for leaving you after ejecting your shuttle, it would not have been possible for me to accompany you. I have left you with a service droid who is able to pilot the shuttle if you need to rest. There is a jar of bacta gel hidden behind the panel beneath the console, I apologise for there not being more of it, this was all I could steal from medical without garnering unwanted attention. Thank you, sir, for your service._
> 
> _M._

Hux skimmed over the note once more, then pushed it to one side in favour of sinking to his knees and ripping the panel away from the bottom of the console table. Sure enough, tucked out of sight behind it there was a palm-sized jar of pale blue bacta gel, cold to the touch after being left in the shuttle presumably for hours, or however long Hux had been unconscious for.

He quickly unscrewed the lid and scooped out a generous amount of the gel onto his fingers, immediately smearing it over the deep blaster wound on his stomach. The effect of it hit immediately, soothing the pain to a bearable level and cooling the intense heat that had been flaring up around it. Hux sighed in relief, gripping the console with his free hand so hard his knuckles turned white. He was more careful when applying the gel to his leg, taking much less from the jar and spreading it thinly over the wound. If that supply was all he had, he wanted to try and save some for a later time, just in case. He was under no false impressions that people out there in the galaxy would somehow be inclined to help him out of his predicament; instead, he knew that there were many out there who wanted him dead for what he did with Starkiller base, and so preserving his only medicine seemed like a smart idea. Who knew when he’d next get a blaster shot to the stomach, or perhaps this time somewhere more permanent, like the head?

Once he’d given himself a moment to let the bacta gel cool his skin, he once again dragged himself up into the single chair and stared blankly out of the front window. If the ship was already warning him about a low air supply, he estimated he had around an hour before it got hard to breathe, and a little over an hour before it cut out completely and he was left to suffocate in the tin can of a ship he’d been left in. That gave him an hour to figure out how the hell to get himself to relative safety, at least to a point where he could rest for a while and work out a more detailed plan.

The entire control panel had now gone dark after he’d successfully shut off the alarms that had been blaring earlier. The foreign language didn’t help, but after squinting through the dim light at the various buttons available to him, Hux managed to discern which lever controlled the escape pod’s weak thrusters. However, upon yanking it towards him, he heard the dull metallic scrape of an un-oiled machine trying its hardest to work, then the sputter and groan of it failing and a piece of it breaking off completely. A few seconds later, he saw that piece drift past outside the viewport and off into distant space. Shit.

No fuel, then. No fuel, and a severely limited air supply. “This just gets better by the minute,” Hux muttered, voice acidic as he gave the console a sharp kick. He still wasn’t entirely sure who’d saved him, and he knew that rightfully he should be grateful, but there was a part of him that wanted to know whether it would have been so impossible for whoever it was to have found him a properly functioning ship, or at least found the time to fuel up the one he was in. Then again, it dawned on him that he had no idea how long he’d been unconscious; for all he knew, the ship could have been fully fuelled when it had been ejected from his old dreadnought, and might just have been drifting so long that its resources were now depleted. The thought terrified him, that perhaps he’d been out for whole cycles without realising.

Hux didn’t even know how things had played out, in the end. He remembered very little; he’d taken himself off after FN-2187 had shot him, bandaged his leg haphazardly, and then not five minutes later he was being shot across the room by Pryde. After that…everything was dark. He had no recollection of being smuggled on to any shuttle, no recollection of when that shuttle was deployed or where. No idea what became of everyone else on that dreadnought, or those in the Order who were deployed at the time.

 _Ren_. He was thinking about Ren, of course, even if he couldn’t admit it to himself.

Things had been tenuous with them ever since the events on Crait. Where they’d always enjoyed a rivalry as part of the attraction of their relationship, after Crait it had switched rapidly from playful to sour. Real resentment blossomed, spread like the bruises that bloomed across Hux’s skin from where Ren hurled him against the wall. He’d broken three of his ribs that day, fractured his collarbone and his wrist, and that was before he counted the crushed windpipe from Ren choking him out in Snoke’s throne room. Ren had been so preoccupied with his own rage at the rebel girl’s escape that he’d paid no mind to Hux on the shuttle back to the Finalizer, hadn’t spared him a glance even as he clutched at his side and breathed shallowly and barely held back a cry every time the ship jittered or stalled on its way out of Crait’s atmosphere. Back on the Finalizer he hadn’t followed Hux to the medbay, hadn’t offered an apology, hadn’t said a word to him. It was only much later, when Hux had been discharged by the med droid and allowed back to his own quarters, that the door slid open to reveal Ren sitting on the end of his bed looking like someone had drained the life out of him.

He still hadn’t apologised, just beckoned Hux to him with a crook of his fingers and muttered, “Let me see.” His voice had been hoarse, and he’d not used it again that night, instead just silently placing a hand over Hux’s wounds and healing them without a word before the pair of them fell into bed to do the one thing they’d never had any problems doing together.

But although they frequently pretended it did, fucking away their problems never really worked, and that had been the last night they’d spent together in any intimate way. Ren had already left his quarters when Hux woke up the next morning, and from then on they behaved like mere colleagues around one another, increasingly in a way that saw Hux subordinated as new leadership drove a wedge between he and Ren.

And now he had no idea where he was. If he was still alive, even. The last he’d heard, Ren had been disappearing from the ship for cycles at a time to visit with Palpatine in secret, a location nobody but him was able to access. Hux expected that Ren was now doing just fine, thriving off the power his new master was giving him and burning down anything or anyone that stood in his path. It was part of the reason he’d decided to help the rebels in the first place – whatever had happened to Ren between Snoke’s death and where they were now, something had stripped him of everything that had made Hux warm to him when they’d met several years ago, and he was now almost unrecognisable. Hux didn’t want that new Ren, cold to the extreme and a puppet for whoever wanted to play with him, to advance any further than he already had. Was it worth risking his own life to save the rebels? Maybe. But he couldn’t deny his curiosity – and underlying concern, that he was trying very hard to deny to himself – over Ren’s current whereabouts.

Hux was shaken from his thoughts as the escape pod gave a sudden violent lurch forward, causing his elbows and knees to smash into the console. Cursing in pain, Hux looked over the single cracked screen to try and work out what the hell was happening, and what he saw confirmed his suspicions regardless of the lack of common language. The screen was displaying a diagram of the orange planet he’d seen through the viewport earlier, which was now completely in view out of the front window and rapidly approaching the shuttle. Or rather, the shuttle was rapidly approaching it.

He’d managed to drift into the planet’s atmosphere, and now due to his lack of fuel he was simply being dragged downwards by its gravitational pull in an extremely quick, entirely uncontrollable free-fall. The entire framework of the shuttle started to rattle, and there was a series of loud clangs as more pieces of metal were shredded off by the speed of the descent and flew backwards, crashing against the back of the pod as they went. BB-13 rolled forwards and disappeared under the console, beeping hysterically as the shuttle became inverted and continued to plummet.

As Hux hadn’t been strapped into his chair, the minute the shuttle turned upside down he fell from his seat and landed heavily on the pod’s ceiling, the metal now boiling to the touch after heating up during its fall through the atmosphere. He thought he yelled out in pain, though with the deafening sound of the wind rushing through the cracks appearing in the ship he couldn’t be entirely sure. The alarms were going off again as they had done before, the light once more flashing angry red as a new voice sounded declaring, **“Low altitude, pull up now. Low altitude, pull up now.”**

Grunting with the effort of it, Hux tried his best to grab on to the back of the chair and drag himself back down towards the console. He pushed on every lever he could reach in the desperate hope that one of them would force the shuttle back into an upright position, or slow it down somehow, or deploy some kind of parachute. None of those things happened, and he actually succeeded in ripping one lever completely off the panel in his haste to yank it towards him.

Out the front window, the ground was rapidly approaching. It was all orange, it looked like pure sand dunes for miles around, with heat lines visible on the horizon. Closer, closer, closer. Seconds passed in flashes as the pod continued to spin in mid-air, tossing Hux around inside it mercilessly.

The voice changed again.

**“Brace for impact. Brace for impact. Brace for impact.”**

The crash felt like someone was ripping Hux apart from the inside out. The window side of the pod hit the ground first, shattering glass into a million shards that flew back up inside the shuttle like bullets from a gun. He felt them slice razor-sharp through his skin, some on his face and others on his arms and legs even through his uniform. The rest of the shuttle crumpled in around him, folding like paper against the impact of the fall. Hux heard the metal scrape and groan and screech above him, digging into his shoulders and bending him into an unnatural shape where he lay, paralysed with fear, on the floor – no, the ceiling – of the pod.

Finally, it stopped. What was left of the console was sparking, and he could smell the strong tang of smoke rising from all around him. For a second he could only lie there, his entire body shaking like a leaf and his eyes squeezed so tightly shut it was making stars drift across his vision behind them. He had to be dead. There was no way he could have survived that, not a second time in the space of a day, that felt too lucky. Too fortunate for a man who’d done everything possible to make the universe owe him nothing but misery when his time finally came.

It could have been seconds before he opened his eyes, or minutes. He felt vaguely out of his own body, as though he were standing outside of the wreckage and watching it all unfold from a safe distance. Still, eventually he got them open and squinted past the smoke that was making them stream with tears, only to discover that the metal of the shuttle had somehow bent in an almost perfect arc around him. By all laws of physics, the impact should have flattened the pod completely, trapping him inside and crushing every bone in his body, if it didn’t just explode directly on impact. But instead, he was laying in a sort of neat cavity with chaos all around him; there were still jagged parts of the ship digging in to his shoulders and legs from either side, but above him, the ship seemed…stable.

“What…?” he croaked, frowning and looking to one side to try and figure out what the hell had happened. He couldn’t fathom any logical explanation, until he saw the very dented, very bent out of shape metal arm laying in a broken mess on the floor of the ship beside him. BB-13 was mostly unscathed, his paintwork scratched but otherwise unaffected, save for the panel in the front of his body that was hanging open with a several-feet-long retractable metal arm dangling from it. On Hux’s other side there were several deep gouges in the durasteel floor where BB-13 had obviously anchored the arm, creating a barrier to stop the ship collapsing on top of Hux. That arm had taken the brunt of the force and the weight of the shuttle’s ceiling, and was now so mangled that there was no way it would properly retract back inside his body.

“…Thank you,” Hux said hesitantly, slowly pushing himself up and keeping stooped since the ceiling was now far too low for him to sit comfortably. He shifted forward and began to crawl as best he could towards the broken front window, just about hauling himself out onto the hot sand outside without slicing up any more of his clothes or skin on the remaining glass. He’d have to go back in for the bacta gel before he considered walking away from the wreck to find civilisation, but for now he was content to simply lay on the ground and gulp in as much fresh air as humanly possible. The sand was still warm from the day’s sun, and although it was now clearly approaching evening on whatever planet this was, the air was still dry and hot. Hux was slightly concerned about how his complexion would fare the following day once the sun made an appearance again, and he resolved to start moving immediately in the hopes of finding shelter before he had to find out what the consequences would be of wandering around aimlessly under no doubt baking solar heat.

Hux shuffled back to the escape pod, circling it once with a frown. He’d been right, then, it was ex-Empire, still marked with the old serial numbers and insignia at the back. Who on earth had been keeping an old Imperial vessel on board a dreadnought, and why? More importantly, why had he not known about it? They were questions he’d have to find answers to once he was somewhere safe, and so for the time being he set about carefully removing BB-13 from the wreckage. It was just logic, he told himself – if someone came along and captured that droid and asked it who it had been travelling with when it crashed, it would answer ‘General Hux’, and if someone then went on to ask if he was dead, it would confirm for them that he wasn’t. Still, he wasn’t about to leave it there, not when it had arguably saved his life twice in a very small amount of time.

The arm was going to be a problem, though. A massive long metal arm trailing behind them as they made their way across the desert seemed like it would draw too much attention when Hux seriously needed to lay low, so he resolved to go to the first black market droid mechanic he came across and have them somehow get the arm back inside BB-13’s body unit before they continued even further. There was no telling whether the droid would come in useful later on, so Hux simply considered it a good and sensible investment to spend some time keeping him safe.

Hux fished around in the wreckage of the ship for the jar of bacta gel, looking at it with undisguised disappointment as he saw how little was left and immediately regretted putting so much on before. He put the jar in the pocket of his jodhpurs and made sure BB-13 was able to roll without the arm getting in the way, then turned and began to walk away from the ruined ship and, therefore, away entirely from his old life. The thought both terrified and thrilled him, though both were tinged with the underlying survival instinct that was overriding and blocking out every other emotion he felt.

However, he hadn’t been walking for long before it became obvious that he’d simply succeeded in walking away from one remnant of his old life and walking directly in to the arms of another. After perhaps half an hour of trekking, he noticed a large black shape laying in pieces on the ground in a vast expanse of flat desert land. The heat lines were making it difficult to see details, but as he approached closer, he knew deep down what exactly he was looking at.

Kylo Ren’s silencer, one wing sliced clean off, burnt and ruined without a pilot in sight.


	2. On Chandrila

The stick hit him out of nowhere, cracking against his elbow and sending pain flaring up his arm. Before he had time to whip round and brace for another impact, a heavier blow was dealt to the backs of his knees that sent him sprawling on his back in the dirt. From somewhere above him he heard elated whooping and the slap of hands clapping together in celebration, then the end of the stick that had hit him came into view for him to grab and be hauled up by.

Ben reluctantly allowed himself to be helped to his feet, brushing bits of earth off his new pants with a winded groan. The word ‘new’ was applied generously – they were actually particularly old, found in a trunk of Han’s things and wheeled out for cleaning so he could change into something that wasn’t black and bloodied. The dark green shirt and dark brown pants weren’t exactly what he was used to, but he knew that was precisely the point; nobody wanted him walking around looking like Kylo Ren anymore, they wanted to shape him into something more comfortable, into Ben Solo. After everything that had happened, he felt inclined to let them.

“It’d be more fun if you weren’t going easy on us.” Poe leaned against the long stick he’d been sparring with, somehow managing to appear unruffled despite how long they’d been training and the considerable heat outside. Now they’d finally stopped, Ben was aware of a pleasant, calm breeze drifting through the gardens, and he was incredibly glad of it. “Two against one, c’mon, that’s not a fair fight. Use the Force, you know you want to. Make it a challenge.” His eyes were flashing, glinting with something between glee and grim determination. Ever since Ben had started to settle into a routine with the remnants of the resistance, Poe had been trying to get a rise out of him that way; Ben suspected it was something to do with the time he’d detained and interrogated him back on board the Finalizer, a desire to beat him down now so he could finally move on from it without hurt pride.

Finn smacked his shoulder and shot him a warning glare. “What the hell are you doing? Huh? You’re asking to get your ass handed to you.” He tossed his own stick to one side and went to go pick up the canteen of water he’d brought outside with him, taking a long drink.

The training session had been an impromptu one, at least on Ben’s part, having been dragged into it when Finn and Poe had approached him in the gardens beside the house with three thin branches snapped off one of the nearby topiary trees. There was a general consensus amongst those remaining that Ben shouldn’t be trusted on his own for too long just yet, and so he’d expected to be interrupted when he’d found himself with a rare moment’s privacy that afternoon. Babysitting duty, as he liked to think of it, was passed around from person to person with varying frequency, although there were those who flatly refused to be left alone with him at all and others, like Finn and Poe, who had a little more nerve when it came to handling him. He had a feeling that was Rey’s doing, that she’d talked them around to it until they’d at least been successfully convinced he wouldn’t suddenly turn on them and kill them. They were comfortable enough not to fear beating him into the dirt during sparring matches, at least, and that was a start.

“That’s not how the Force works,” Ben said, rubbing a hand over his face and glancing back towards the house. The sun was beginning to set behind the sleek glass panes that made up the domed roof, glinting off the side of the building and reminding him that he’d already spent too long outside for one day. Too long away from where he really needed to be. “You can’t just turn it on and off when you want. Besides, I was distracted. You wouldn’t have won otherwise.” That much, at least, wasn’t a lie. He’d woken up that day not feeling entirely right, and it was a feeling that had stuck with him for hours up until the current moment. It was like a cold sensation running up the back of his neck, a tight clenching in his stomach. He thought he knew what it was, but it was nearly impossible, and so he’d tried his best to dismiss his thoughts as nothing but paranoid suspicions. So far, it wasn’t working.

Grabbing his own canteen, Ben raised a hand in a sort of parting wave and began to walk back across the large lawn towards the house. “Come find me when you want a real fight!” he called without looking back to them, a smirk ghosting across his lips at Finn’s indignant cry of outrage. Though he didn’t spend too long dwelling on it with the myriad of other things he had to contemplate, he was genuinely grateful for the time the pair of them had put in with him so far. He wasn’t at all blind to the fact that he’d wronged both of them on direct, personal levels, and he couldn’t say with complete certainty that he’d show nearly as much mercy as they had if the situations were reversed.

The house was warm when he stepped in through the back doors, the air inside the marble entrance hall smelling pleasantly of the fresh flowers that grew out in the gardens. Ben wasn’t sure who had been picking and arranging them in vases around the house, but there were so many people that came and went each day it could have been any number of them. Regardless, it was nice to have them inside, something to break up the otherwise largely empty space. A neat half-circle of golden light fell upon the floor where the sun was beginning to move away from the glass dome, and Ben reminded himself to power on the lights when he came back downstairs so the house wouldn’t be plunged into darkness.

Chandrila had seemed like a logical place to come, once everything was said and done. After the battle on Exegol and the tumultuous few days that had followed, during which every remaining resistance member was busy drafting casualty lists and taking stock of what few supplies they had left, attention had swiftly turned to where they planned on settling now that they could exist in the galaxy without fear of discovery. The jungles they had been hiding in with tents and makeshift huts weren’t suitable in the long-term, and reminded everyone far too much of the unstable, impermanent nature of war to ever provide any sort of comfort. Ideas had been thrown around for many different potential home bases, and when Ben had suggested Chandrila he’d expected it to be dismissed purely because the suggestion was coming from him, but to his honest surprise it had been given logical consideration. It made a certain kind of sense; it had once been the site of peace talks in the last intergalactic war, there was property readily available and already in their name, and it was developed enough for them to live comfortably without anyone having to sacrifice any comforts.

The house they were staying in had been there for years. In fact, it was the very house in which he’d been born, large and sprawling and set on acres of open land that served well as a site to store remaining supplies and ships. What had once been a pleasure garden specifically designed for a princess and filled with pristine flowerbeds and water features now resembled an airfield, with damaged X-wings lined up in neat rows to be tinkered with during the day. Ben thought that his mother would prefer it in its current state anyway; he remembered very little of his time spent on Chandrila in childhood, but one standout memory was Leia complaining to Han about the unnecessary pomp and grandeur of the house, as though he’d somehow had a hand in designing it – as though, left up to him, they wouldn’t just live on the Falcon full-time.

In the near distance, the shining glass skyline of the city was visible in all its glory and accessible by a short speeder ride, making it ideal for those in the resistance who wished to live separately in their own homes away from the main house. There was an unspoken understanding amongst the entire group that not everyone had an interest in remaining a part of the resistance once things had settled once and for all, and that many wanted to enjoy peacetime by returning to their normal lives and attempting to forget the things they’d seen and done. When that happened, many would either leave Chandrila altogether in favour of a different planet or they would be glad of the distance between them and their old leadership, to give them some semblance of normality. For now, though, everyone was staying, everyone was standing by.

For Leia.

Her bedroom was on the top floor of the house, where good natural light came through large windows each day and where the room was plenty big enough for medics and medical droids to circulate around her bed freely as needed. There were monitors set up to keep track of all her vitals, and they beeped softly and steadily all hours of the day in what Ben had come to see as a reassuring little song. Although she had yet to wake up, there had been signs of life from her – an occasional movement of her hand, twitch of her mouth, shift of her leg. Reaching out to Ben had drained her of everything she had, and Ben knew logically that it would be a long time before she was ready to take her place as leader again. But for now she was stable, and that was all he could ask for.

Ben spent most of his time sat at her beside, often meditating in an attempt to reach her through the Force or at least to maintain his newfound connection to the light. It was peaceful in her room; the house had been opened up during the day times to any member of the resistance who wished to use it, whether to fix their ships or strategize or simply socialise, and so most of the rooms were a flurry of activity at any given hour and hardly provided a suitable environment for focus and mindfulness. Leia’s room was the only place that nobody else was allowed into, nobody besides the very core group that made up her inner circle – Ben, first and foremost, then Rey, then Finn and Poe and occasionally Rose.

As the house was beginning to wind down for the evening, there was only one medical droid in the room when Ben quietly opened the door and slipped inside. It beeped at him once in greeting before rolling off and out the door, leaving him and Leia alone together. That in itself was a comfort – if the droids felt able to leave, it meant that nothing was wrong, her condition hadn’t worsened. Ben moved to the chair at the side of her bed and sat down, reaching out to cover one of her small hands with his own large palm. She was warm, and if he closed his eyes and concentrated he could feel the beat of her pulse under his fingertips, steady and reassuring.

He'd travelled in the transport with her as they left the old base and relocated to Chandrila. It had looked quite alarming, her body covered with a thin sheet and hooked up haphazardly to temporary life support that was only designed to take her a short way. Any time they had to stop to refuel or reroute their course to avoid an asteroid field, he grew more anxious that the systems would fail and she’d be taken from him. He grew impatient when the pilots requested to stop to give themselves a break, insisting he could fly the ship in the meantime, though at that point nobody had trusted him enough for that. Perhaps now they would, now they’d spent some time at the base without incident.

Outside the window, the sky grew darker. He watched Finn and Poe’s figures, now merely shadows in the garden, retreat across the lawn to come inside as the temperature steadily dropped. Chandrila’s climate was generally mild, never too hot or too cold, but in the very middle of the night it got cool enough to require more layers of clothing in order to go outside. The fresh air was still favourable to the recycled air of the Finalizer, and something Ben had become pleasantly accustomed to already.

After an hour or so of sitting quietly and listening to the gentle beeping of the monitors behind the bed, during which Ben came close to drifting off to sleep in his chair, the unmistakable whirring of an approaching ship started to sound from outside the house. He glanced up and rubbed a hand over his eyes, squinting against the glare of the Falcon’s lights as it sped into view and came to a swift, neat landing on the front lawn. Once the lights were off it was too dark to see the door open and the pilot step out, though he didn’t need to, he already knew who it was. He could feel it.

Rey had taken off as soon as it was decided where they would settle, leaving in the Falcon and allowing Poe to take charge of the resistance’s migration to Chandrila. She’d been gone for just under a week, and nobody had received any communications from her in that time. The only reason they were sure she was alright was because Ben could sense she wasn’t in any danger, and increasingly Finn was also reporting that he could ‘just tell’ that she was doing fine, though he hadn’t yet expanded on that revelation despite Ben’s curiosity. He supposed it wasn’t unheard of that an ex-trooper could be strong with the Force – after all, nobody had any idea where the First Order had plucked Finn from, or who his family was. It was something to be explored later, once they all had more time and preferably once Leia had woken up to advise them.

Ben had expected Rey to go straight to her room or seek out Finn now that she had returned, positive that she’d be too tired from her journey to come and check on Leia that night. So when the door slammed open and Rey sprinted full-speed into the room, he was more than a little surprised.

“You’re back,” he said, blinking owlishly at her and rising from his chair.

For a minute Rey looked back and forth between he and Leia as though she didn’t quite understand what was happening. Then she approached the bed slowly, a frown creasing her forehead. “Is she…?” She paused at the side of the bed and reached down to touch Leia’s hand, exhaling so heavily her shoulders sagged. “I thought she was gone.”

Ben frowned, sinking into his seat again as Rey took up position in the chair across the other side of the bed. “Why would you think that?”

“I saw her, on Tatooine.” Rey started to unbuckle the belt she was wearing, the one that contained her new sabre, the one she’d built herself meticulously after vowing to bury Leia and Luke’s. Ben was still working on his, making slow progress as he battled with the ever-present fear that leaning into that side of him once more would re-open his connection to the dark side. “She and Luke appeared to me as I was burying their lightsabres. She looked like…” She shook her head, setting the belt carefully on the floor beside her chair. “I thought she was dead, that’s all. I’m glad to know she’s not.”

Ben swallowed thickly, feeling a lump form in his throat and something heavy settle in his stomach. “I’ve been trying to reach her,” he murmured, reaching out and taking Leia’s hand gently. He didn’t know his hands were capable of that much care, as accustomed as he was to using them for lashing out and destroying. He still worried that one day he’d told too hard, push too far, and end up breaking something delicate that had started to form around him. “For days now, I’ve been trying to get through to her. She hasn’t shown herself to me yet.”

Rey was looking at him with a kind of open sympathy that he detested. His only real validation for being at the house at all was his connection to Leia; if she had died already, part of him doubted the others would have been quite so accommodating. And so for her to be resisting communicating with him hardly looked good for him, and he hated that Rey pitied him for it. Hated that he couldn’t even get his own mother to speak with him through the Force, and now others knew it. It was humiliating.

“She’ll come to you,” Rey promised, tilting her head to try and hold eye contact with him even as he averted his gaze to stare at the floor. “She will, don’t lose hope. She wants you to be here, she was willing to risk everything to make it happen, don’t forget that.”

Ben desperately wanted to change the subject. Taking a deep breath, he released Leia’s hand and sat back in his chair, doing his very best to adopt an air of unaffected ease. “How was Tatooine, then?” he asked, folding his arms over his chest and setting his jaw in a way he sincerely hoped didn’t look like a pout. He’d been mercilessly teased over his temper and tendency for childlike tantrums by…certain people on board the Finalizer, and it wasn’t something he needed reminding of now.

Rey looked at him carefully for a minute longer, as if deciding whether or not to push the matter of Leia’s lack of communication. In the end she made the choice to leave it, sighing and leaning forward to rest her arms along the side of the mattress in front of her. “It was fine. I found Luke’s home, I buried the sabres beside it…it felt right, it felt…proper, like that was where they should…”

“Did you go to my Silencer?”

Blinking, Rey looked up from where she’d been playing with a corner of Leia’s blanket and fixed him with a measured, narrow-eyed stare. “…Excuse me?”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have interrupted her. But it was important, and although he’d intended on waiting until morning to ask her about it he now realised that wouldn’t be possible with her sat right in front of him. “My Silencer, the one you took down on Pasaana. Did you go back there and find it?”

“No, of course not, that’s parsecs away from Tatooine. Why?” Rey watched him carefully, and when she evidently sensed his reluctance to answer she rose from her chair and loomed across Leia’s bed in an attempt to look as intimidating as possible. He wondered if her concern had something to do with the fact he’d referred to the Silencer as ‘his’, when in fact it had belonged to Kylo Ren, a man they were now adamantly referring to as dead and gone. “Ben. Tell me why.”

Sighing, Ben tugged a hand through his hair and crossed his legs in agitation. “I don’t know,” he muttered, hating that that was the truth. He despised feeling weak in any capacity, and a weak mind was just as much of an insult as a weak body. His lack of understanding about his entire situation unnerved him to no end. “I felt…when I woke up this morning I felt wrong. I can’t explain it but it’s like an ache, right in my stomach, not painful but…distracting. And then earlier today I swear, I know someone was there on Pasaana, I know someone found that ship.”

“Ben…any number of people could have found it,” Rey said, proceeding with caution as it became apparent that Ben wasn’t completely in his right mind. “It was left in the middle of the desert, and not unreasonably far from the nearest town. It’s likely that one of the locals came and stripped it for parts, that’s all. First Order tech is expensive, high quality.”

Ben was already shaking his head before she’d even finished talking. “No. No, no, this was someone…” It was someone he knew. Or someone that knew him, as he had been, as Kylo. There was no other reason for him to have sensed their presence like that.

Rey frowned, sitting back down and taking Leia’s hand. “You should get some rest,” she said quietly. “You’ve not been sleeping, I can sense it. I know you want to wait with her, but you can’t be surprised that you’re not feeling right if you haven’t been resting properly. You need to go to bed, Ben. I promise, I’ll call to you if she wakes up while you’re away.”

Logically, Ben knew she was right. Ever since they’d got to the house he’d been ignoring the bedroom that had been set up for him in favour of sleeping in the chair beside Leia’s bed, and even then he never slept willingly, only when his body could no longer stay awake and he simply fell unconscious without realising it. He supposed he could try sleeping in an actual bed, though he doubted it would do much good. The beds in the house were soft, designed for comfort and luxury, a far cry from the hard bunks on the Finalizer. Adjusting to that alone would take more effort than it was worth, in Ben’s opinion, but he knew Rey wouldn’t let him alone until he at least tried.

Ben rose from his chair and turned to leave the room without another word, sticking his hands in his pockets to stop his temptation to reach out for Leia one last time.

Before he could reach the door, Rey called him back. “Ben?” She stood up too, rounding the corner of the bed and catching up with him to lay a hand on his arm. For a second she just stood facing him, conflict and uncertainty radiating off her. For someone so practiced and skilled at guarding her mind, her feelings were now uncommonly loud. Seconds later, she stretched up onto her toes and pressed a soft kiss to his cheek.

Ben stiffened, his shoulders tensing. He didn’t breathe, didn’t move until she retreated again, at which point he gave her a quick, jerky nod and immediately turned to slip out of the door. That, there, was the one thing he’d appreciated about Rey being gone. Neither of them had had time to talk about what had happened on Exegol, about the single kiss they’d shared once he’d brought Rey back. He’d thought about what he would say when the time came for them to have that conversation – whether he would try to pass it off as delusion as a result of him almost dying, or a momentary passion, or something else entirely. He only hoped that she wanted to have a conversation at all; his biggest concern was that she’d simply expect something of him one day that he couldn’t give. That she’d want to come to bed with him. He knew she’d never do anything without his say-so, but he didn’t want it to get to that point at all. Whatever had been blossoming between them over the past few months was gone, as far as he was concerned – it had been put there by Palpatine to entice them both, and without his influence, for Ben the attraction was now gone.

He tried to put the thoughts out of his mind as he reached his bedroom and began to ready himself for bed. The room was pleasant, with large windows overseeing the gardens although the thick, dark blue velvet curtains were currently drawn across them. The bed was huge, far too large for just one person, with soft and heavy sheets in an inoffensive pale blue colour. Ben stripped his clothes off and draped them over the back of one of the armchairs by the windows, sliding into bed and settling back against the pillows with a huff.

Irritatingly, he fell asleep within minutes. Sleep dragged him down and held on tight, and with it came flashes of scenes he was sure didn’t come from his own memory. He was seeing through someone else’s eyes, watching someone else’s journey. In those images it was daylight outside though the sun was clearly beginning to set, the ground formed of sloping sand dunes that slid away underfoot and made it difficult to tread. The air was dry and hot, and somewhere close by there was the faint sound of beeping and scraping metal.

> _His Silencer was laying in pieces on the ground, one wing ripped off completely and scattered some ways in the distance. The body of the ship was charred and burnt, crumpled in places with the windshield completely shattered. Whoever was looking at it was feeling…anguish. An ache in their chest, deep and genuine. They circled it, once, then twice, even though making any sort of physical effort was causing them great pain, because of…wounds, more than one, open and weeping._
> 
> _The person turned to the side as the beeping sound continued. There was a droid there, a droid that was clearly broken. Its extendable arm was hanging out the front of its body and crushed into a battered heap of tin, but aside from that, it looked whole enough. It looked, in fact…familiar. Black and sleek…it was a First Order droid. A BB-unit, not unlike BB-8 who now trundled around the estate, except much darker in colour. Who would be travelling near his Silencer with a broken FO droid? Had someone survived the attack above Exegol, was someone trying to find him? And if so, for what purpose? To kill him?_
> 
> _“Enough.” The accent was clipped, prim, yet strained as though thick with emotion. “We need to get to town.”_
> 
> _That voice. That voice was so familiar…_
> 
> _The person rounded the ship again and came to a stop in front of the droid, looking down at it directly. The round glass dome of the droid’s lens reflected their face, and Ben saw a shock of red hair, a scratched pale face, exhausted-looking and thin but unmistakable nonetheless._
> 
> _Hux._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Sorry this took longer to get up than I expected, Christmas happened and I got caught up with celebrating with family! I hope everyone who was/is celebrating this holiday season has had an amazing time so far! <3 
> 
> Thank you so much for the incredible response to the first chapter, it's really warmed my heart! I'm going to see the movie again tomorrow so that'll re-open the wound of Hux's death again and I'll no doubt want to write another chapter straight away haha, so I don't expect the wait to be so bad for the next one! Thank you all for your patience and for your lovely comments, and I hope you enjoyed this new chapter too! Please leave a kudos and a comment if you did! <3


	3. Broken, Needs Repairs

Hux reached the edge of town just as the sun set completely and the sky was plunged into darkness. The lights of the huts and taverns were a welcome glow after the miles and miles of open desert, and he was reassured by the apparent lack of screens and holos in the relatively primitive streets. It decreased the chance that the civilians had ever seen one of his First Order broadcasts from around the time Starkiller had been put into operation, the broadcasts that now solidified his place as one of the most hated men in the galaxy. He wondered idly what the bounty on his head would be, if people found out he was alive. After wondering about it for mere seconds, he resolved to never let anyone find out, and nip the problem in the bud that way.

The flat soles of his jackboots slid down the last small sand bank towards the paved street leading into the town, the shoes not designed in any way for grip or support. They were intended for the smooth durasteel floors of the Finalizer, for style and formality, not for real outdoor work. He was very glad when he was on solid ground again, stretching his legs out to give them a minute to adjust to not compensating for the shifting sand any longer. The wound on his leg was agony after walking so far, painful to the point where it had almost become numb, though not in a way that provided him with any mercy. He simply felt like he was dragging a dead limb around with him, and he sincerely hoped that wasn’t a sign of what would end up happening to it once a proper medic got a look at it.

The streets of the town were in a state, littered everywhere with the remnants of colourful balloons and powder cannisters and decorative wreaths. The stone paving was spattered with all kinds of colours, the pigments so bright and vibrant compared to the monochromatic scheme of the Finalizer that he found himself genuinely admiring them as he walked the narrow paths between rows of houses. It almost looked the way a town did after a First Order raid, when troopers would storm in and rip out bookshelves and furniture and leave it all scattered out in a heap, usually to be set fire to like a beacon warning others of what would happen if they dared transgress. But this felt different. He knew something had happened on the planet, clearly – there was no other reason for Ren’s Silencer to be there, in the mess it was – but it didn’t feel like a normal, standard raid.

It occurred to Hux as he walked that he had no idea what planet he was on, and therefore no clue how to speak to the locals. Kriff, he didn’t even know what the locals looked like, whether they were a peaceful race or one who’d take one look at him and decide he was dinner. He glanced down at BB-13, who was trundling along beside him with a rhythmic ‘clang’ every time his broken arm hit the ground. He was probably doing more harm to himself that way, and Hux knew they needed to find somewhere soon that could repair him. But more importantly, he was wondering if the droid would be any use when it came to translating Basic into whatever language the locals spoke, and vice versa. He knew of droids who were specifically designed to provide that service – his father had kept a couple around the manor on Arkanis when he was a child, to make diplomatic meetings go more smoothly – but he was certain that no BB unit in the First Order’s employ would have such a skill. Nobody would have bothered programming it in.

Hux was pulled from his thoughts by a shape moving in front of his vision. Glancing up, he came face to face with a short, bald creature wearing a sort of sack-like red dress, with a long cylindrical nose and bulging eyes. Quite an ugly thing, really, and it was looking at him as though it were terrified of him. It took him a moment to realise how he must look to it – bleeding profusely from two different wounds, paler than death, wearing a tattered FO uniform and trailing around a badly beaten droid. Really, he’d be afraid of himself too, if he came across himself alone on a darkened street.

At a loss for anything else to say, Hux struggled to pull himself into a better upright posture and said, “I need help.”

The creature blinked once at him, then said something very quickly in a language he didn’t realise. After not getting a response, the creature repeated the same word, making some sort of waving motion with its short arms. When that, too, didn’t draw out any conversation from Hux, the creature simply turned and waddled away down a smaller side-street and out of Hux’s sight.

“No!” Hux cursed, curling and uncurling his hands into fists. He should have expected that to go poorly, and yet it got under his skin all the same. Wasn’t it obvious that he was hurt, in pain? Wasn’t it clear just from looking at him that he needed help? He didn’t think it was necessary to speak the same language to understand that, and yet evidently it was going to be difficult to find anyone who was inclined to assist him. Perhaps he’d been wrong, and the civilians of the town had actually seen the broadcasts of him standing in front of his legions of troopers and giving the order to destroy multiple planets in the blink of an eye. It would be a horrible, drawn-out feat of higher justice if that were the case, if he were to suddenly pay for his actions now, like this. Bleeding out on a planet full of strange, unfamiliar creatures wasn’t quite how he’d pictured his final few moments.

There was only one thing for it. He was desperate, and that desperation bred carelessness – or perhaps it was confidence? In any case, it pushed him to limp on to the first house on the street with a visible light in the window and bang multiple times on the door with his fist in the vain hope that someone would open up. As far as plans went it was hardly very nuanced or clever, but he’d lost enough blood and been walking without food or water or rest for long enough that any signs of intelligence had long since abandoned him.

The first door swung open after around eight loud knocks. The creature that answered it looked much like the first one Hux had encountered, only this one’s sack-dress was blue and its nose was longer and thinner. Just as ugly, if not more, he thought privately as he geared himself up to debase himself and beg for help. This time he forewent any formal request and simply gestured to BB-13 pointedly, jabbing the air around the unfolded metal arm and repeating, “Broken. Needs repairs,” over and over in the sheer hope that the creature would understand what he meant.

No such luck. The first door was closed in his face with little ceremony, the slam of it echoing down the street surprisingly loudly since it only looked to be made of wood and clay. The second house yielded much the same results, only as he continued down the row of huts it seemed that each neighbour was woken by the previous interaction and not at all happy about it. Soon the doors were answered with yelling in that same strange language he didn’t understand, and before long the creatures he’d spoken to previously started to stick their heads out of their windows and join in the shouting, amplifying it in the otherwise silent streets.

Hux was ready to give up and retreat back to the edge of town when a door finally opened behind him and someone addressed him in accented Basic.

“Hey.” The man looked middle-aged, human in outward appearance with a small triangle of facial hair on his chin and something resembling motor oil smeared on the rest of his face. He was dressed unlike the other creatures, in a regular shirt and pants with a dirty rag tossed over one shoulder. “You wanna get off the street before you wake the whole damn town. You in the mood for makin’ enemies tonight?” He stepped to one side to make more room in the doorway of his hut, gesturing for Hux to go inside past him. “C’mon. In.”

Hux was incredibly hesitant to do as he said, because there was every chance this man knew who he was and would want to do any number of things with him once he had him trapped. Once again his earlier thought about the bounty on his head popped unbidden into his mind, and he was treated to the grim idea that this man could sell him out immediately to people who’d see him tortured, killed, and by stepping inside he would essentially be rolling over and allowing it to happen. But he also didn’t have many other options – it wasn’t as though his escape shuttle would be any good for getting him off the planet, and so far this was the only person he’d come across who could actually communicate with him. He’d be foolish to walk away now. Besides, he had to come to terms with the fact that he was now essentially a fugitive, a criminal, and criminals didn’t get five-star treatment. They didn’t get to socialise with upstanding characters in fine establishments, they got to mingle with other bandits and smugglers and thieves who could be paid off to keep quiet.

So, after a minute of deliberation during which the yelling from up and down the street still didn’t let up, Hux made his mind up and stepped in through the door of the hut with BB-13 in tow. The room he entered was small and cramped, essentially a carved pit of earth full of wires and tools and bits of scrap metal laying about haphazardly. There was an electric lamp hanging from the ceiling that was bathing everything in a horrible fluorescent glow that made him feel faintly sick, and he made a beeline for the one flat surface he could see that wasn’t covered in junk so he could finally sit down. His legs thrummed and tingled as he took the pressure off them for the first time in hours, his feet numb in his boots.

Outside, the man called out a couple of things that seemed to appease the neighbours enough to encourage them back into their own homes before shutting the door and coming to sit down heavily in front of Hux. He had some sort of utility belt strapped around his waist, Hux noticed, containing innocent enough things like wrenches and an assortment of screwdrivers. A mechanic, then, perhaps? Some kind of engineer or technician? Hux wondered if he’d been out further into the desert to strip Ren’s Silencer for parts; he was almost tempted to get up and have a look around the hut to see if he could identify any of the equipment from it.

“You’re looking rough.”

Hux hadn’t expected to be spoken to so directly just yet, as though they had known each other for years instead of only just meeting a second ago. He looked up at him in surprise, eyebrows raised indignantly. “I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly, though the comment left him insecure enough that he held his hand tightly over the wound in his stomach. He bit back a hiss as he felt blood seep over his fingers – clearly the bacta gel had rubbed off onto his uniform during his walk through the desert. “I don’t know who you are. How do you know this isn’t just how I always look?”

The man smirked and shook his head. “I know who you are. And you didn’t look like this in them recruitment posters, did you? Always thought you were a pasty lookin’ man, but you look about ready to drop, now.” He stood up and went to a corner of the room, shoving some larger sheets of metal to one side to reveal a rudimentary metal tap sticking up from the ground. Hux immediately became aware of how dry his throat was, and he was incredibly relieved when the man fetched up a metal cup and filled it to the brim with water. As he passed it over to him, he nodded and said, “General Hux.”

Hux took the cup and narrowed his eyes at him. “Alright, you know who I am. What are you, ex-First Order?” He took a sip of his water, not even caring that it was terribly lukewarm and tasted faintly of copper. It was better than nothing, and it soothed the burn in his throat in a way he’d been wishing for all day.

The man shook his head. “Nah. I don’t pick sides, don’t do allegiances. Easier to pack up and move about if you’re not affiliated, y’know?” He leaned against the wall, tapping his hand absently against his leg. “You can call me Kastan. Sorry I ain’t got a trooper number you can reel off, I’m guessin’ that’s what you’re more comfortable with.”

Glowering, Hux said nothing and buried his face in the rim of his cup to save himself from retorting anything smart-arsed. It was a miracle this man knew who he was and didn’t immediately want to kill him – he had to be one of the only few men in the galaxy who weren’t interested in taking that opportunity when presented with it – and Hux didn’t want to push it now by getting mouthy over a weak, offhanded quip about the Order. He needed to remember that the Order was gone, there was nothing left to defend.

Kastan crouched down and held out his hand in a way that signalled BB-13 should approach, which he did, slowly. The hut was so small that the metal arm barely fit in between the front door and the back wall, and he had to curl it behind him as Kastan loomed on his knees in front of him. “Kriff, this is a mess. The hell have you done to it? What, they don’t teach you how to respect your droids in the First Order?” He retrieved a screwdriver from his belt and tapped the end of it against the crumpled metal arm; BB-13 beeped quickly and rolled away, closer to Hux’s leg.

“ _Careful_ ,” Hux hissed, shooting Kastan a glare. “ _I_ didn’t do this. We were in a crash, our ship…” He broke off, gesturing vaguely towards the door with one hand. “It’s gone, anyway. Completely destroyed. Feel free to go and strip it for parts tomorrow, add to your collection.” He looked around the room indignantly at the piles and piles of metal scraps.

Kastan either didn’t pick up on the acidic sarcasm in his voice, or he didn’t care. Instead he coaxed BB-13 back towards him and started to check him over more thoroughly, picking up the arm and resting some clay blocks beneath it so it was level and no longer trailing on the floor. “I can fix him,” he was saying as he worked, reaching behind him to grab a larger assortment of tools and spread them out on a cloth in front of him. “Won’t take long, either.”

Hux narrowed his eyes and removed the cup from in front of his mouth. “How much?”

“Fifty credits.”

“ _What?!_ ” Hux spluttered, setting the cup down with considerable force and almost rising to his feet before he remembered how sore his legs were. Instead he just shifted forward on his perch and gestured madly to BB-13. “That’s ridiculous! I just need his arm put back inside, kriffing hell, I could do that _myself!_ ”

“Oh yeah? With what tools? Because you sure as hell ain’t using mine for free.” Kastan sat back on his heels and put his hands on his hips, tipping his head back to look down his nose at Hux. It was a pathetic display of physical domination that Hux truly didn’t appreciate, though he had to admit he was stuck. He couldn’t travel on anywhere with BB-13’s arm hanging out like that, and Kastan was right, he had no means to fix it himself even if he had the skills.

Snarling, Hux leaned back on his seat and returned his hand to its place over his stomach wound. “Fine,” he muttered. “But I don’t even _have_ fifty credits. Something tells me First Order currency isn’t exactly good anymore, and I’ve never carried New Republic currency in my life. So what do you propose I do, hm?”

Kastan shrugged. “Search me. Leave him here, if he’s that much trouble to you. You could _make_ money off him that way – I’d buy him off you for scrap right now, cash in hand. I’d pay enough to get you on a ship off Pasaana.”

BB-13 beeped frantically.

“What? No! No.” Hux sighed, rubbing a hand over his face and immediately regretting it when he realised he would have just smeared blood all over his forehead and cheeks. Whatever, it wasn’t as though anyone who mattered was around to see him. Who was even left who mattered anymore, anyway? “There’s got to be something we can arrange.”

For a second, Kastan sat rubbing his chin and appraising BB-13 carefully. “He’ll need a redesign,” he said eventually, and before he could get the rest of his sentence out Hux was already prepared to argue with him.

Hux threw his arms up in the air exasperatedly. “Oh, wonderful. And how much extra is _that_ going to cost me?”

“Nothing! Kriff, calm down. You’re quick to piss off, aren’t you? You know what they say about redheads.”

Unbidden, Hux was reminded of an interaction he and Ren had had months ago, before things turned sour. Snoke had been placing unreasonably high demands on them both for far too long at the time, and Hux had come precariously close to completely losing his mind at a petty officer on the bridge when it transpired she’d forgotten to complete and send her daily debriefing report, resulting in an error with one of their radar systems that could have been prevented. He remembered feeling the rage build up in him, white hot and all-consuming, and he’d been prepared to finally ruin his reputation of remaining calm under pressure by letting that rage explode in front of everyone when he was suddenly called away by Ren to speak with him privately.

They’d got as far as the hallway before Ren had rounded on him and backed him against the wall. He’d been wearing the mask at the time, expressionless and unreadable. “You’re far too hot-headed, General,” he’d said, which had only angered Hux more. “It’s a weakness you’d do well to keep in check.”

Hux hadn’t realised it at the time, too caught up in his own anger and exhaustion to think, but Ren had been deliberately saving him from losing the respect of his subordinates that day on the Finalizer. Had he blown up at them, raged and ranted with no real good reason and without the stress of battle to blame it on, he would have become a laughing stock. He supposed, if he saw Ren now, he would thank him. Among the hundreds of other things he’d want to say to him. He wondered what Ren would say if he saw him now. Saw him riddled with true weaknesses – ugly wounds that would likely kill him in the next few days if he didn’t find some way of properly tending to them. Saw him losing his temper with a stranger, huddled in a mud hut in the middle of the desert on a planet he desperately wanted to escape, but couldn’t.

But maybe that couldn’t happen now. Maybe Ren was dead. The wrecked Silencer didn’t exactly give the impression that he was alive and well. The thought sat in his stomach like a rock, his mind refusing to properly process it. For all that Ren had irritated him in the beginning and fully enraged him at the end, he didn’t want him dead. He couldn’t quite imagine a galaxy that didn’t have Ren in it, even as an enemy. When he’d imagined Kylo Ren losing, he’d imagined him imprisoned and out of his hair for him to visit if it suited him and ignore if it didn’t. The thought of him just being _gone_ , entirely, was horribly daunting and added to the feeling of nausea already creeping over him.

“I can swap out some parts.” Hux was drawn back to the present by Kastan’s voice, and the scrape of metal as he rummaged around in the piles of scrap at the back of the hut. “You can’t walk around with him looking like that, even if you change clothes and cover your face he’d mark you out as First Order from miles away. If you’re hell-bent on keeping him, you’ll want to change how he looks.” He came up from his search holding several small metal panels in varying colours. “Look, I’ll even let you take your pick, how generous of me.” He came over to crouch in front of Hux, offering up the different pieces for him to look at. There was a small handful of orange parts, some chipped red, and some larger panels in a pleasing pale blue colour. Hux reached out and tapped that pile, and Kastan tossed the rejected colours unceremoniously over his shoulder back onto the pile. “Nice choice.”

Hux regarded him suspiciously as Kastan went to go take his seat on the floor in front of BB-13 again, using his screwdriver to begin prying the decorative panels away from his body unit. “You still haven’t told me how this makes up for the cost,” he reminded him. The last thing he wanted was for Kastan to complete his repairs and then demand payment after; he’d heard of plenty of backwater tradesmen who did that, and he had absolutely no means of paying up in that eventuality.

Kastan successfully popped the first panel off and held it aloft, letting the dim ceiling light shine down onto it like a jeweller checking for the authenticity of his wares. “See these? These are pricey parts, exclusive to First Order droids. Much sturdier than anything else you could build a BB unit with. You said you were in a crash?”

Hux nodded.

“Yeah, that’ll be how he survived it. Any normal droid would’ve been crushed like a tin can, but not this one. First Order shit is superior.” He carefully laid the pieces he removed to one side, continuing with his work until only BB-13’s shell was left over, devoid of any embellishments or decoration. “They reinforce the shape and add strength. I’m proposing a trade, right? I take these off your hands, fit him with some scrap metal to hide the fact he’s FO, and we’ll call it even. Deal?”

Hux chewed his lower lip thoughtfully, looking back and forth between Kastan and BB-13. “It means he’ll be more prone to breaking.”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t recommend getting in another crash.” Kastan shrugged, twirling his screwdriver around his fingers. “Your call, Red, but make it quick. I was planning on getting some sleep at some point tonight before you showed up.”

Sighing, Hux nodded. “Alright. Go on.”

Kastan nodded and began to work, selecting pieces that almost fit the cavities left behind in BB-13’s body and using a sharp knife to cut them properly to size. It would be a haphazard job, shoddy and probably not particularly pleasing to look at by the end, but at least it would give Hux a fighting chance of blending in with crowds once they found a way off the planet.

Pasaana. He knew that name – he remembered Ren making the decision to travel there once they’d located the rebels in their search for the wayfinder.

“Do you know what happened, in the end?” Hux asked the question before he could stop himself, blinking and glancing up in the hopes Kastan might not have heard. But of course, he had, and Hux felt the need to clarify, “With the resistance, the First Order, everything.”

Kastan let out a low whistle, raising his eyebrows and turning his attention back to his work. “Depends on what you already remember. You probably know more than I do, being FO.” His eyes skimmed over Hux’s wounds quickly, and his eyebrows seemed to raise further. “Or ex-FO. I won’t ask.”

Hux honestly appreciated it. He barely understood his own reasoning behind having done what he did, he didn’t want to have to sit there and explain it to a complete stranger. It involved too much history and too many emotions for him to even begin making sense of it before he’d eaten, rested and had his wounds treated. Perhaps, once all those needs had been met, he’d devote some time to working out what the hell he’d been thinking. “I remember Palpatine. Discovering he was alive. Did that make it out to civilian news, or did that remain confidential?” He’d been the one to spread that information to the rebels, of course, but he had no idea if they’d chosen to make it public or not. They didn’t seem like the type to want to instil mass fear and panic among their followers, so he assumed they’d kept it to themselves.

“Oh, yeah, everyone knew about that. Got a real nice broadcast, very dramatic. Signal went out to every frequency in the damn galaxy, you’d be pressed to find anyone who didn’t hear it. Made everyone damn near shit themselves, I’ll tell you that.” Kastan gave a couple of particularly harsh bangs on the piece of metal he was forcing into a cavity, and BB-13 beeped indignantly.

“So what happened then?” Hux’s view on things was considerably limited, and it agitated him immensely. He knew Ren had gone to Pasaana, and the knights had taken the wookie as a prisoner. Ren still hadn’t returned when it came time for Hux to help the rebels escape, and he had no idea if he’d made it back after his brief trip to the medbay for his leg wound. He’d gone straight from the medbay to the bridge, where Pryde had shot him, without ever knowing if Ren had come back alive from Pasaana.

Kastan shrugged, speaking around a spanner between his teeth. “How should I know?” He spat the spanner out and used it to tighten the panels he’d already fitted. “I told you, I don’t do sides, I wasn’t there when it all went down. I’ve heard bits and pieces from people who’ve stopped off here since to refuel – by the sounds of things it was a whole civilian effort to bring Palpatine down, lot of people with their own ships just…showing up with blind hope that it’d work out in their favour. If you ask me, you’d need to have a screw loose to walk into something like that.” He tapped the side of his head with the spanner.

“I see.” Hux drummed his fingers on his knee, trying to form some sort of timeline of events in his head. Aside from anything else, he was curious to know how long he’d been unconscious on that shuttle. Had it been hours, or as long as days?

“Sounds like it took a lot outta the General, though,” Kastan was still talking, swapping out the spanner for a screwdriver and beginning work on BB-13’s damaged arm. He carefully detached each retractable segment and used a small hammer to get rid of the dents, working with surprising deftness and skill for someone who seemed so…crude and rough as a person.

“The General?”

“Y’know, the Princess? I’ve heard rumours – just rumours, mind you, I dunno if there’s any truth in ‘em and I don’t much care, just passes the time. But I’ve heard rumours she’s been taken off to some planet in the Core Worlds, somewhere real nice, you know? To recover. Apparently she almost bit the dust trying to fight Palpatine, or something.” Kastan shrugged. “I mean, she might not have been fighting him herself, somehow I doubt it. She’s getting’ on a bit, right? She wouldn’t be puttin’ in any dirty work. Point is, her inner circle’s done a full retreat, pulled her away to rest up.”

Hux’s palms grew slightly sweaty where they gripped the knees of his jodhpurs, and he swallowed around the sudden thickness in his throat. “Her inner circle.”

Kastan nodded. “Uh-huh. You know – her acting General, the wookie, that girl everyone’s up in arms about, and her son. Ben Solo.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello hello! I saw Rise of Skywalker again yesterday and watching The Scene That Must Not Be Named again made me want to immediately write another chapter for Hux, so here we go! I'm so so pleased that everyone's enjoying this fic so far, I really love and appreciate all your feedback on it! <3 
> 
> Please please, if you enjoy this chapter please consider leaving a kudos and a comment for me, they really do inspire me to write much faster! And for those of you who aren't a fan of new characters in fics, don't worry, Kastan won't be a big feature in this story or anything, I just needed someone to move the plot along who isn't a major player in the world of the films! I promise we'll be moving along with the reunion nice and soon! <3


	4. Rescue Mission

Of all the people gathered in the living room at three in the morning, Poe was undoubtedly the least pleased about being there. They had all set up camp at various points around the room, huddled in blankets and still dressed in their night clothes; Rey was curled up with her legs tucked beneath her in a large armchair by the unlit fireplace, Finn was sprawled on the couch looking vaguely disoriented by the early hour, Poe was perched on the arm of the couch and Rose – who had come inside from her shift as night watch just as Ben and Rey were rounding people up – was standing behind Rey’s chair, her posture suggesting she hadn’t quite shed the mindset of being on duty yet.

Ben was the only one moving, pacing up and down in front of the fireplace in a self-absorbed frenzy. He wasn’t sure if he was muttering to himself or if it was more of a conversation within the Force, but he was inclined to believe the latter since Rey was rubbing at her temples and periodically glancing up at him with a weary, resigned expression. He’d feel bad about it, if he wasn’t so preoccupied.

Poe’s irritation reached boiling point somewhere around Ben’s third lap of the room, and he stood up abruptly from his perch to physically block him from walking any further. “Alright, come on, man. It’s three AM, you woke us all up, tell us what the hell’s going on or I’m goin’ back to bed.” He squared his shoulders, which undoubtedly would have looked more intimidating had his curls not been in disarray from sleep and his cheek not dented by the pillow, but it still had the desired effect of forcing Ben to stop and calm down for a second.

Ben opened and closed his mouth like a fish out of water, his eyebrows knitting together as he tried to find a way to phrase what he wanted to tell them. Because, realistically, he knew it wasn’t going to go down well. The last thing he wanted or needed was for Poe and the others to start questioning his loyalty now, when he was only just starting to settle, and when even that was tenuous.

“It’s Armitage Hux,” Rey supplied gently, a surprisingly calm and unaffected voice from the corner. Everyone turned to look at her, Ben blinking as though he’d forgotten she was there and Poe setting his hands on his hips and raising an eyebrow. Rey was looking only at Ben, her face completely unreadable as she sat forward in her chair and drew her blanket tighter around her shoulders.

“Excuse me?” Poe turned to look behind him at Finn, then to Ben, then back at Rey. “You just say Armitage Hux? As in, General Hux, of the First Order? What’s this got to do with him?” His hackles were up already, it was obvious he was on the defensive at the mere mention of his name. If Ben had been anticipating a fight before, now it was guaranteed.

Ben sighed, sinking down onto a vacant armchair and hunching his shoulders, only just resisting the urge to put his head in his hands. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so small, so completely at someone else’s mercy. Even when he’d knelt in front of Snoke in submission and taken punishment after punishment under the guise of ‘lessons’, it had felt different. Back then he’d had some semblance of power, the idea that it was all in aid of making him stronger. This, he knew, was nothing like that. If Poe and the others refused to help him, it would be the thing to finally break him, once and for all. There was no power to be found in the knowledge that Hux was out there, somewhere, and that he had no way of getting to him alone. “He’s alive,” he said, his voice sounding hollow even to his own ears. “I thought he was dead. I was _told_ he was dead, that he’d been executed before what happened on Exegol. I should have gone to see for myself, but I couldn’t…” He couldn’t bring himself to. By that point he was already too far gone in his own head, seeing visions of his father and questioning everything he’d been raised to believe for the past decade of his life. Seeing Hux lying dead on a medical table with a blaster wound mangling his chest would have been too much to bear. And so he hadn’t. He’d nodded to the trooper who’d informed him of Hux’s execution, feigned indifference, and done what he needed to do on Exegol with thoughts of his final moments swimming in the back of his mind.

Rose frowned, leaning her elbows on the back of Rey’s chair. “I don’t understand. I thought he was one of the higher-ups, top of the food chain. Why would he be executed?”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t know. I was told he was the spy, the one who’d been sharing information with the Resistance. Whether or not that was true, I don’t know. There’d been tension between him and another officer, I expect that played a part.”

“He was the spy,” Finn confirmed, mouth set in a grim line. He sounded incredibly reluctant to admit it when he added, “He helped us escape when we went back to the ship for Chewie. Told me to shoot him so it’d look like we overpowered him and ran off. Guess it didn’t work.”

Ben groaned, giving into temptation and burying his face in his hands miserably.

“But he’s alive?” Poe seemed unconvinced, eyes narrowing as he folded his arms across his chest. “How do you know, how can you be sure of that?”

“He saw it in a dream,” Rey supplied, rising from her chair and going to stand beside Ben with a hand between his shoulder blades. “A vision, while he was sleeping tonight. He saw Hux near the crash site of his Silencer on Pasaana – it seems Hux has found the wreck of his ship, and believes Ben to be dead.”

“Believes _Kylo Ren_ to be dead, you mean,” Poe interrupted, scoffing disdainfully. “If this is all real, if he’s not making shit up, then Hux has no idea Ben defected to the light. Doubt he’d react too well to finding out Supreme Leader Kylo Ren is now Ben Solo, effectively under house-arrest on Chandrila.” He shook his head in disbelief, leaning against the fireplace and rubbing a hand over his forehead. “I can’t believe we’re even discussing this. What does it matter, anyway? So he found his way to Pasaana, what’s the problem? If anything, he’s lucky he hasn’t been caught by the Republic yet, they’re going after First Order officers.”

Rey sighed, subtly rubbing the spot where her hand was resting on Ben’s back. “He’s injured,” she said slowly. “Blaster wounds. One in his leg…” She nodded to Finn, in acknowledgement of what he’d told them about Hux’s escape plan, “And one in his stomach. It’s…bad, evidently. Life-threatening. However he got to Pasaana, Ben doesn’t think it was intentional. It was most likely a crash, a failed landing, something like that. He’s stranded.”

Poe made a clicking noise with his tongue, tapping his foot on the floor in agitation. “The way you’re talking, Rey,” he said, “Sounds an awful lot like you expect us to do something about it.”

For a minute, an uneasy silence settled over the room. Finn, now fully awake, sat forward and braced his elbows on his knees, eyes flicking back and forth between Rey and Ben. Rose circled round the back of Rey’s chair and came to stand beside Finn’s couch, arms crossed. Eventually, Rey took a deep breath and said, “I can’t make that decision by myself, I’m just saying we have to at least _consider_ …”

The room exploded. Everyone was immediately trying to talk over everyone else, gesturing wildly as their faces hardened into angry, grim expressions. Poe’s voice was the first to rise above the din, as he stormed into the middle of the room to put himself in front of Ben. “We don’t have to do shit! Rey, that man is _evil_ , you can’t seriously be considering going to get him and _bring_ him here!”

“Poe, we can’t…”

“He almost had us executed, he gave the order.” Rose looked defiant, her jaw set and knuckles going white where they were gripping her arms so tight.

“He designed the stormtrooper training programme. It might have been Phasma that carried it out, but that was all him. You got answers for that?” Finn demanded, standing up to come and hover beside Poe.

“How about the planets he blew up with his custom weapon, huh?” Poe added, practically vibrating with anger.

Rey stood up too, elevating the tension in the room by another couple of notches. Now Ben was the only one seated, curled in on himself in a way that would have looked ridiculous for a man of his size under any other circumstances. “ _Listen_ ,” she stressed. “Can we just _stop_ , just for a _minute?_ ”

Poe shook his head firmly. “No. No, we’re having this conversation. We’re having it, because it’s _necessary._ ” He walked closer to Ben, crouching in front of him and tilting his head to the side in a way that was somehow more threatening than when he’d been looming over him at full height. He was like a predator, ready and waiting to strike at any sign of weakness. “Are you _really_ going to sit there and try to tell us he’s a good person?”

Ben looked pale. When he finally raised his eyes to meet Poe’s, they were bloodshot and tired, the dark circles beneath them seeming more pronounced in the dim, grey light of the room. His hair was in disarray, and there were red marks on his cheeks where he’d been gripping his face in his hands. He took a deep breath, though it shuddered on the intake, and let it out slowly. “No. No, that’s not what I’m saying. I know Hux, and I know he can be…malicious, and cruel, and manipulative, when he wants to be. I’m not going to pretend he’s blameless and I’m not going to try and convince you he’s done nothing wrong. I’m just asking you… _please_ …to give him a chance, now that this is all over.”

Poe looked at him carefully for a second, as though trying to gauge how much of that little speech had been genuine and sincere and how much had been a lie. “How do we know he’ll come around, huh?” he asked eventually, straightening up and setting to pacing the room like Ben had been doing earlier. The floorboards popped and groaned underfoot, squeaking whenever he pivoted to start off in a new direction. “The Order’s the only life he’s ever known – hell, _you_ were raised by Leia Organa and even _you’re_ still on thin kriffing ice here…”

“Poe!” Rey looked mildly horrified, her hand gripping Ben’s shoulder a little too tightly. She didn’t like it when he, or anyone else, questioned Ben’s position in their ranks. She was so concerned with making sure he felt accepted, felt like he belonged to quell any urge to turn back to the dark side, that any suggestion otherwise was taken as an almost personal insult.

“Well it’s true! Think about it – Ben’s here because he chose to be. Yeah, okay, maybe only in the nth hour, and maybe he could have had that kriffing revelation sooner and saved a lot of lives, but the point is, it was his decision to come here. Some part of him wanted to change, to turn to the light. We have no evidence whatsoever that Hux wants that. For all we know, he’s just doing what he can to save his skin. The things he’s done? There’ll be a bounty on his head big enough to buy a whole planet, and I’m willing to bet that he knows it.” Poe shook his head. “I don’t trust him.”

“He saved your life. He was a spy for the Resistance, that’s got to say something about where his morals lie now…” Rey seemed to be able to tell that she was on the losing end of this fight. Every point Poe made was too compelling, too emotional.

“Yeah,” Finn jumped in, “And you know what the reason was that he gave us, for doing that? He wanted to see Kylo Ren lose. Said he didn’t care if we won or not, he just didn’t want to see _him_ ,” he jabbed a finger in Ben’s direction, “Succeed. So that’s something else I want to know – if you two were clearly at each other’s throats, why the sudden eagerness for a rescue mission? The slimy bastard wanted you dead, why do you want to go to so much trouble to save him?”

Again, silence settled over the room. Ben wasn’t going to answer. Nothing in the galaxy could make him open his mouth and say the words out loud to answer that question, and he wasn’t sure if that was stubbornness or pain or denial or something else entirely, but whatever it was, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He was spared, yet again, by Rey. From behind the couch he heard a soft intake of breath, and the hand that had been rubbing his shoulder went still.

“He’s in love with him,” she said quietly.

Poe blinked. “Come again?”

Rey ignored him. “Ben. Is that true? Do you love him?”

Was it true? To anyone looking in from the outside, what he and Hux had couldn’t be called love. They fought, and it was ugly. They said things to each other with acidic, poisonous malice, things meant to hurt and sting and linger in the back of the mind for days after they left their mouths. They manipulated one another – Hux would wrap him round his little finger, Ben would realise too late and lash out in anger, embarrassment, humiliation. And they called it fun. They were playful about it, all the awful things that happened between them, they knew their limits and never pushed it so far as to do lasting damage. Until that day on Crait, when everything had started to fall apart and the downward spiral had started. Things had been different since then, worse. But if he really, truly thought about it, and neglected to consider the opinions of anyone else, yes. Yes, he loved him. More than anything.

“Well that’s great,” Poe was saying, throwing his hands up in exasperation and turning his back on the pair of them. “You want us to go risk our lives fetching a war criminal from Pasaana because he’s got Ben dick-whipped. Are you _kriffing_ kidding me?”

Rey was still looking at Ben out the corner of her eye, but she addressed Poe when she said, “We could go and get him. We’d hardly be risking our lives, Pasaana is one of the most peaceful worlds I’ve ever been to, once you take the First Order out of the equation. Which they now are, so I don’t see a problem. We have the ships for it, we know exactly where he is…”

“You’re asking too much of us, Rey. Way too much.”

“Poe. We can’t let him die, not when we know for sure that he’s out there. That’d make us no better than them.”

“I can live with that. He’s a monster, Rey, you know the things he’s done…”

“I know. And I’m not excusing them. But I don’t think any of us, in good conscience, can leave a man to die when there’s something we could do about it.”

Poe looked exasperated, finally sitting back down and tugging a hand through his hair in frustration. “I’m just trying to do right by Leia. Trying to figure out what she’d want done here.”

Rey went to kneel in front of him, taking his hands and looking up at him earnestly. “Then _don’t_. If it’s causing you stress, don’t try to decipher what she’d want. We can go and retrieve him, bring him here, treat his wounds. We can use him for information, he may know something about where other officers of the First Order went into hiding after Exegol, you never know. If he’s smart, he’ll recognise it as the opportunity for redemption that it is and he’ll tell us everything he knows. And then, once Leia recovers and wakes up, she can decide for herself what she’d like to do with him. It absolves you of guilt _and_ responsibility. I can’t think of a fairer compromise than that.”

They stared at each other for a prolonged minute. For a moment it almost seemed as though Poe might disagree again, but then his expression softened and his shoulders sagged on a sigh. “Fine,” he muttered. “Kriffing… _fine_.” He stood up very suddenly, gesturing for Finn to follow him up. “We’d better go now, if we wait around I’m for sure gonna talk myself out of it. Get dressed – Rose, you too, you’re coming with. Falcon’s still undergoing repairs so we’ll take a spare shuttle, bring something for his kriffing wounds so he’s not complaining the whole flight back…”

Ben stood up stiffly and made as if to follow them, but Poe spun round on his heel and jabbed a finger at his chest to stop him in his tracks.

“No. Hell no, absolutely not. You stay here.”

Ben’s chest felt like it was caving in. “I can’t,” he said, with complete open honesty. “I can’t do that, I need to go with you, I need to see him…”

“Buddy, don’t push it. You got no idea how lucky you are that we’re even going. I don’t trust this whole situation as far as I can throw it, I’m not having you and him in the same place for the first time in however long if that place is a confined ship with the rest of us on it. Non-negotiable.” With that, he turned away again and swept off towards his room to get properly dressed, Finn and Rose following in tow.

Ben stood there, completely dumbfounded, every nerve ending in his body screaming at him to run after them and force them to let him come. It’s what Kylo Ren would have done. Kylo Ren would have had Poe crippled and choking by now without even touching him, and he wouldn’t have let up until he got what he wanted. But he wasn’t Kylo Ren, he was Ben. And clearly, Ben was a coward.

“Ben…” Rey said gently, coming up behind him and laying a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. It won’t take long for them to reach Pasaana from here at lightspeed, they’ll have him back in no time.” She adjusted her blanket and straightened her posture, and Ben knew enough to know that she was trying to put on a brave face. “Let’s just…keep busy, why don’t we? He’ll need a room set up for him. Poe will insist it’s one that can be locked from the outside. Why don’t we go and pick one out?”

Ben turned to face her properly, eyes roaming over her features to try and discern what she was feeling from her expression alone. He could probe into her mind, try to see that way, but it seemed too much like what Kylo Ren would have done. He had a feeling that, once the others returned – hopefully with Hux in tow – he was going to be scrutinised more than ever before for any behaviour that might suggest he was turning against them. He had to get into the habit of checking himself, once and then twice, to make sure he wasn’t slipping back to the dark without even knowing it. “I’m sorry,” he said, because it seemed like the right thing to say, and the only thing he could think of.

Rey raised an eyebrow, and he was surprised to see the corner of her lips quirk up into the tiniest of smiles. “You don’t know what you’re apologising for,” she observed. She didn’t have to dig into his mind for that, either, it was just painfully obvious.

“I…” Ben swallowed around a lump in his throat, diverting his eyes to pointedly look anywhere but at her. He settled on the fireplace, wishing it was lit to ward off the chill creeping over the back of his neck. Then again, maybe it was the uncomfortable tension of the conversation he was trying to have that was doing that. “It’s just. You kissed me, on Exegol. And now you’re finding out that Hux and I…” He shook his head. “I’m just sorry.”

“Oh, Ben.” The smile on her face grew, but not unkindly. It was soft, almost pitying, and it sat strangely with him. He didn’t like to be pitied, it was almost worse than being mocked. “We could have talked about this sooner, if it’s been troubling you. What happened on Exegol was…impulsive. You’d _saved my life_ , Ben. Kissing you felt like the right thing to do at the time, I hadn’t thought about it too extensively, in all honesty. I’m sorry if that’s not what you want to hear.”

Ben shook his head quickly. “No. No, it is. I don’t think of you like that. I think of you more as a…” He struggled for the right word, dismissing ‘sister’ outright but not quite knowing what else to say. “…Cousin,” he finished lamely. He supposed that was about right; with how close she and Luke had become in such a short space of time, and the revelation of her true parentage, a cousin was probably the most technically correct term for what they were to one another.

Rey sighed in relief. “I’ll tell you something,” she said, gesturing for him to sit with her on one of the couches. “When I was on Tattooine, burying their lightsabres, a woman came up to me. She was curious, because nobody had been to Luke’s house in so long. She wanted to know who I was. I told her…I told her my name was Rey Skywalker.” She bit her lip, looking at him expectantly, and he realised that she was waiting for him to say something, almost…waiting for some sort of approval.

In truth, it didn’t hit him as a surprise. She was more of a Skywalker than he was – the more time he spent thinking about it, the more he just felt like a Solo, and not in a particularly favourable way. But the news that felt a connection to the Skywalker name did not shock him, and did not upset him. “It suits you,” he said honestly. “And it will invite fewer questions than if you were to use your real name. Leia will like it.”

Rey nodded, seemingly pleased by his reaction. “She seemed to, when I saw her and Luke there. She smiled.” She reached out and squeezed Ben’s wrist. “I promise, she’ll show herself to you soon. She has to, she’s getting stronger every day.”

When Rey had told him that earlier, he’d been eager to believe her. He and his mother had a lot of missed time to make up for, he had a lot of wrongs to right, a lot of apologising to do. She needed to be awake for any of that to happen, and aside from anything else, he was increasingly starting to miss the simple comfort of having her talk to him. He hadn’t had that since he was a child, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit he needed it now more than ever. But now, all of it was made more complicated. Suddenly, the day she woke up became the day that Hux could be arrested, executed officially, imprisoned for life. He wanted to believe his mother would be merciful, but he couldn’t deny that what Hux had done would, for anyone else, warrant the highest form of punishment. The only thing he had going for him was that he and Ben were close, and with Ben’s own position so tenuous, he wasn’t entirely confident of their chances.

“Promise me you won’t run,” Rey said suddenly, the smile gone from her face. He didn’t know if she’d been following his train of thought, if he’d been projecting, but she seemed so serious now that he found it hard to believe she hadn’t. “Once he gets here. I know it’s hard but you have to trust that Leia will do the right thing. Please, Ben, don’t run away with him. No matter what he says, or how scared you are of what she’ll decide, _please_. You have to stay here and see it out to the end.”

Ben didn’t want to make that promise. Realistically, he knew that he would do whatever it took to protect Hux once he had him in reach. If that meant leaving behind Chandrila and the others…he couldn’t honestly say he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t ever go back to the way things had been before, he wouldn’t return to the dark side, but he would run with Hux if he needed to. “Okay,” he said instead, nodding. “Okay, I promise.”

If she suspected him to be lying, she didn’t say anything. Instead she just smiled reassuringly, squeezed his arm, and stood up. “Good. I’m going to help them load the ship. You should go back to bed and get some rest.” She left the room the same way the others had, and Ben remained sat on the couch alone, the room suddenly feeling much colder and larger than before.

From outside the window he could hear commotion in the garden, and he got up to go and perch on the window seat to watch the proceedings. Poe was walking back and forth to and from the house with supplies, handing them off to Finn who slotted them carefully into the cargo hold of the shuttle they’d selected. It was nondescript, emblazoned with a New Republic crest but otherwise of a standard size and design. They would pass unhindered anywhere in the galaxy in a ship like that, something he noted in the back of his mind should he ever need to escape easily. Rose was busy circling the shuttle conducting last-minute flight checks, calling things out to Finn that Ben couldn’t hear through the glass. He watched as Rey came out and joined Finn on his supply runs, Ben’s head tipping to rest against the window. Seeing them work as a team like that, all of them in sync without the need for rigid training or instruction like in the First Order, was…pleasant.

If he felt at all like he was a part of that team, it might be enough to convince him to stay with them. But he wasn’t. They didn’t trust him, perhaps rightfully so, and it was making him realise more and more that the only person he’d ever truly felt that connection with was currently thousands of light years away, bleeding out and at the mercy of a galaxy who wanted him dead. As the checks on the shuttle were completed and the three of them climbed inside and powered up the engines, Rey standing back to watch them take off, it was all Ben could do to just desperately hope they reached Hux in time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh heeeeyyy, guyssss..... 
> 
> It's been a minute :) 
> 
> I am so sorry this took so long! I had a ton of work to do over the Christmas break, turns out grad school is actually a lot harder than I thought it would be, go figure. Between that and working some extra shifts to try and save up some money, I've barely had any time to stop and take a breath! But here we are, FINALLY a new chapter! I'm sorry if this one isn't too exciting or insightful, I'm realising I prefer writing Hux so I always find it easier to get his chapters out faster - I'm looking forward to when they're finally reunited just for that reason, honestly. Anyway, I'm so sorry for the wait, I'll really try and get things moving quicker from now on. Teaching for my degree finishes in a months' time and then I'll have a lot of free time (dissertation writing/research time that I'll be using to write fic instead hehe) to work on this! 
> 
> If you like this chapter, and if you're still out there in the void clinging on to this fic despite the ridiculous wait time I just put you through, please do leave a kudos and a comment! Thank you so much to everyone who's stuck with me so far, you're all stars! <3


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